Try as he might to spin it as a sign of progress, President Obama’s announcement that he will leave thousands of us troops in Afghanistan when he leaves office shows that he was overly optimistic about the Afghans’ ability to defend themselves against the Taliban, the remnants of Al Qaeda and other insurgents.
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“As you are all well aware, I do not support the idea of endless war”, Obama said Thursday as he announced he was dropping plans to withdraw almost all USA forces from Afghanistan by the end of next year.
Obama said USA troops’ mission in Afghanistan won’t change.
Senior Obama administration officials said that 5,500 USA troops will be kept in Afghanistan until 2017 – past the end of Obama’s presidency.
The top USA military commander in Afghanistan, Gen John Campbell, expressed concern last week over the “tenuous security situation” and said an enhanced military presence would be necessary if the Taliban were to be repelled. He now says, however, that more troops are needed to continue training Afghan forces and to carry out counter-terrorism efforts.
President Barack Obama made ending the war in Afghanistan one of his top objectives during his campaign for the seat he now holds. Having a larger set of troops in Afghanistan will now cost about $15 billion, meaning approximately $5 billion more than the 1,000 troop force Obama previously slated to occupy Kabul.
The revised strategy eventually drops the force level to about 5,500 troops by December next year and they’ll stay at least through the start of 2017.
On Fox News Channel’s “Special Report”, Krauthammer remarked on an observation made by former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, that although Obama supported the troops, he never supported their mission.
“Afghan forces are still not as strong as they need to be.
This probably won’t be the last”, Obama defended his decisions, “I suspect that we will continue to evaluate this going forward, as will the next president”.
In Iowa, Carly Fiorina said the president “is now recognizing that Afghanistan is becoming potentially a haven for ISIS and that the Taliban is not on the wane as he has tried to convince the American people”.
In yielding to those facts on the ground even as he insisted, far from credibly, that the American “combat role” there had ended, President Obama effectively determined that the next commander-in-chief will inherit the burden of America’s long war there.
The USA troops in Afghanistan will be stationed at a small number of bases, including Bagram, Kandahar in the south, and Jalalabad in the east.
The United Nations says the Taliban are now in more parts of Afghanistan than any time since their ouster.
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“They’re tired of the separation”, McNeill said.
